The researchers did indeed discover a warp drive solution: a method of manipulating space so that travelers can move without accelerating. There is no such thing as a free lunch, however, and the physicality of this warp drive does come with a major caveat: the vessel and passengers can never travel faster than light. Also disappointing: the fact that the researchers behind the new work don’t seem to bother with figuring out what configurations of matter would allow the warping to happen.
I strongly suspect all solutions will either be invalid, or be limited to the speed of light.
The universe seems to have a lot of weird quirks (the speed of light being 1) what they have in common is that they make time paradoxes impossible. This points to some deeper physics causing these disparate effects. Anything travelling faster than C can be configured as a time machine, and so create paradoxes.
It’s disappointing in its limitations, yes, but another step in bringing warp-driven travel into a more mainstream conversation and line of theoretical research in physics.
As with Albucierre’s proof, theoretical research always starts with the corner solutions and odd cases to reduce the variables.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Einstein’s general theory of relativity is a toolkit for solving problems involving gravity that connects mass and energy with deformations in spacetime.
They have some physical scenario, like a planet orbiting a star or two black holes colliding, and they ask how those objects deform spacetime and what the subsequent evolution of the system should be.
They’re scientists’ response to the unsettling fact that vanilla GR allows for things like superluminal motion, but the rest of the Universe doesn’t seem to agree.
In a paper accepted for publication in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity, the researchers dug deep into relativity to explore if any version of a warp drive could work.
So the team turned to software algorithms; instead of trying to solve the equations by hand, they explored their solutions numerically and verified that they conformed to the energy conditions.
There is no such thing as a free lunch, however, and the physicality of this warp drive does come with a major caveat: the vessel and passengers can never travel faster than light.
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